Clear Pro-Life Thinking

Director of Training

Timothy Brahm is the Director of Training at Equal Rights Institute. He is interested in helping pro-life and pro-choice people to have better dialogues about abortion through 1) taking care to understand what the other person means, 2) using more carefully-constructed arguments, and 3) treating each other with care and respect. He graduated from Biola University with a B.A. in philosophy and is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute.

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Many conversations about abortion succeed or fail because of your rapport, or lack thereof, with the pro-choice person. Even a perfectly articulated pro-life argument will just glance off of a combative pro-choice mind, so people who are skilled at dialogue use wisdom to build rapport and make the tone of the conversation friendly.

This piece gives a kind of interesting dialogue tip that has made a huge difference in building rapport in my conversations. I didn’t even notice it was significant until my colleague Rachel pointed it out.

“My body, my choice” is possibly the most common slogan in defense of abortion right now, and an embarrassing number of pro-life people completely misunderstand it. This misunderstanding is so common, and it is so destructive. For me, and the rest of the team at ERI, it is a point of particular frustration. This piece is a response to a particular meme that completely misunderstands bodily rights arguments, and is therefore really harmful to the pro-life cause. Please stop sharing it.

Right before we released the Equipped for Life Course, we realized that one of the videos seemed to include Virtue-Signaling. Since Virtue-Signaling is a negative thing, it was rather confusing that this particular instance seemed okay. Finally, after about a year and a half, I gained some clarity and wrote this post.

In this piece, I offer some distinctions between types of Virtue-Signaling with the hope that people will be able to distinguish the objectionable types from the acceptable types. I close with suggestions about how and when to accuse someone of Virtue-Signaling, all with the desired end of helping dialogue to be more productive between parties that disagree.

A couple months ago, a series of tweets about abortion went viral. They used the pro-choice argument involving a burning fertility clinic thought experiment. As a pro-life advocate who occasionally gets questions about abortion issues, I received questions about this thought experiment from maybe 20 different individuals.

For some reason, pro-choice people tend to think this argument demolishes the pro-life view, so it’s important to be ready to respond to it efficiently (meaning you need to focus on just a couple of disanalogies, not all of them) and persuasively (meaning you need to convince them that you aren’t just weaseling out of a problem with your view). My focus in this piece is practical dialogue—how to respond to this argument in a way that pro-choice people are most likely to find compelling.

This piece is an unofficial part 3 to the pieces about my conversation with Brent. Those articles ended up touching on the important issue of the role of the right to sex in the argument for abortion. When I came upon an article about Planned Parenthood’s view on whether or not someone has an obligation to disclose HIV to a sexual partner, I saw the connection and thought it was worth pointing out.

GET THE EQUIPPED FOR LIFE COURSE

We spent years carefully testing arguments against abortion in thousands of conversations all over the country. We have learned which arguments are the most persuasive to today’s pro-choice advocates. We have learned how to communicate them in ways that they find compelling.

Josh has publicly debated leaders from Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Georgians for Choice, and one of the leading abortion facilities in Atlanta.

He has been happily married to his wife Hannah for ten years. They have three sons, Noah, William, and Eli. They live near Charlotte, North Carolina.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

This blog is focused on helping pro-life people be “more persuasive and less weird” when they communicate with pro-choice people. We also write about relational apologetics, because we believe that some pro-choice people will not change their mind after a Facebook debate or a conversation on a college campus; they’ll only change their mind because their friend persuaded them.

If you are pro-life and want practical tips for having effective dialogues with pro-choice people, this blog is for you. If you’re pro-choice and you want to explore pro-life ideas without being called names or having your arguments simplified, you will enjoy this blog, as many other pro-choice people do. Check out our top posts >>

SPEAKING

Josh Brahm speaks on topics related to helping pro-life people have better conversations with pro-choice people. These talks include responding to specific pro-choice arguments as well as talks on relational apologetics. Check his availability here >>